Old courthouse site won't be abandoned

ST. GEORGE—Sooner or later the old courthouse will come down. That's no big loss to this little town. The loss is in the place.

A Dorchester County courthouse has stood at the foot of the railroad tracks off Ridge Street for more than a century, right at the heart of the grid of streets that laid out the original St. George. It's a point of pride for the town, a sense of its standing in the fractious county. Town leaders put up the original building themselves in 1898, after winning a dispute with Ridgeville and Dorchester on where to locate the county seat.

A new courthouse is scheduled to open this spring off U.S. 78 on the edge of St. George, a mile south of the tree-lined old neighborhood where the existing courthouse stands. It's a $10 million edifice as imposing as its two-story high pillars, located on 87 acres where a complex is planned with a joint fire and EMS station, office space, sports fields and walking trails.

Sometime in the next few years, the last offices remaining in the current building will be re-located, and the building demolished.

Read more in tomorrow's editions of The Post and Courier.